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Government can't heal the environment and shouldn't try: James Varney

Northshore Winter Weather Traffic Troubles

Southbound traffic into New Orleans slows as fog envelopes the Causeway on Monday, January 27, 2013. With a third bout of winter snow and sleet predicted tomorrow, St. Tammany Parish public schools will be closed Tuesday and Wednesday. After ice and sleet closed the Causeway last Friday, many Northshore residents are preparing to stay closer to home again tomorrow. (Photo by Julia Kumari Drapkin, Nola.com | The Times-Picayune)
(JULIA KUMARI DRAPKIN)

Schools and offices in New Orleans and surrounding parishes started calling it quits for Tuesday and Wednesday before noon Monday. Wimps. This global warming thing is getting out of hand.

The culprit is another burst of unusually bitter winter weather, as bad or worse than what shrouded cars and streets with black ice and closed the Causeway last Friday. The kids are doing back handsprings; parents are not.

Ironically, both patches of nasty weather came on the heels of a Pelican Institute luncheon in Baton Rouge at which the topic was finding market-based solutions to environmental issues (conveniently lumped now under the "climate change" label, the better to cover gaps in the old global warming alarm).

The topic was a timely one. At some point, and hopefully quite soon, serious people are going to have to muzzle the zealots and come up with some ideas that make sense.

First, the overall volume on global warming must be lowered and the issue seen in context. That is, for no contemporary resident of Earth is it close to the most important thing, and it shouldn't be close to the most important thing for science, either. The attention given to the topic dwarfs its significance. Science would better serve mankind by finding solutions for current disastrous situations, like the diminishing potency of antibiotics.

Instead, activists and their media enablers hijack the debate so that everyone knows the image of the poor polar bear, but few people realize we could be moving backwards to when a blister playing tennis can kill you.

As Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Alex Bozmoski of the Energy & Enterprise Initiative noted at the Pelican Institute lunch, the private sector can and should be relied upon when it comes to solving this energy/climate dilemma.

As Murray said, richer countries are cleaner and healthier countries. The real issue confronting the world isn't emissions and the like from the United States or Europe, but from rapidly developing nations such as China and India. Somehow, a bridge to full development must be found for those countries, which understandably aren't about to stop their economic engines in response to some abstract problem and demands.

The notion that government can simply put the brakes on energy development is also foolish and punitive. Yet we see it in action with Washington's stubborn refusal to fast track pipelines and New York Gov. Mario Cuomo's blanket refusal to allow companies to tap the state's vast natural gas reserves.

Cleaner forms of energy will help, and the federal government and some states are standing on the shoulders of zealots to limit it. Such policies get an F: they benefit neither the employment situation, the energy situation or, ultimately, the environment.

What we do not need is the sort of government largesse favored by President Obama, who will be sure to sprinkle generous doses of climate change spending into his State of the Union address. Indeed, Obama cited climate change in his second inaugural speech, and a recent love letter from The New Yorker boasted of it as an area in which he has made progress.

As surely as those earlier efforts wasted more dollars than lowered greenhouse gases, the same will come of any dubious propositions put forward in the State of the Union theater. Washington can't pick winners in the marketplace, and it has no business trying to do so. Do the soothing syllables "Solyndra" and "Tesla" mean nothing? How about "ethanol?"

True, these government missteps helped funnel billions to the politically connected rich. In that sense, they widened the income inequality we will also hear much about tonight and thus served a political purpose. But it's clear they didn't accomplish a damn thing in terms of improving the environment.

Nevertheless, the altruistic screen that environmental activism provides has left America with a dangerous situation in which its president talks openly of acting in a unilateral fashion, while last week politically charged scientists urged the president to "sidestep" or "bypass" Congress and act through executive decrees.

Scary stuff. Indeed, the willingness of people to go along with or encourage such unfettered authority, as if the United States had an emperor instead of a president, is much scarier than looping debates about what temperatures might be in, say, 2041 or 2063.